Remote Enterprise AI Architect: Strategy & Governance

EPAM Systems Inc; McLean (VA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental and Vision Insurance

Health Savings Account

Matched 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan

Paid Time Off

Job summary

EPAM Systems, Inc. is seeking an AI Architect to design the target architecture of AI-native applications for large enterprise clients, including RAG systems, assistants, and agentic workflows. You will define evaluations, guardrails, and constraints, framing problems and aligning ownership across teams.

The role emphasizes decision-making over code volume, with hands-on prototyping when evidence is needed and mentoring of other architects in EPAM's AI practice.

Qualifications

• You have architected AI-native systems in production - RAG, assistants, agents or agentic workflows with real users or real business processes behind them - and you held architect-level responsibility for the system around the model
• You are a proven solution or software architect with a strong production track record who has started building with AI on your own initiative in the last year or so - a side project, a proof of concept, an internal tool, published writing - and wants to make AI-native design the center of your work
• Solid experience as a solution, software, or enterprise architect with delivery accountability: systems you designed that shipped, ran, and were maintained over time
• Depth in distributed systems, integration, cloud, and data-flow architecture at enterprise scale
• Demonstrated ability to work with ambiguous, conflicting requirements and to make trade-offs explicit rather than resolving them silently
• Experience presenting options, costs, and risks to non-technical decision makers and getting decisions made
• A habit of writing things down: architecture decision records, design documents, reference architectures that other teams built from
• Recent hands-on coding ability, enough to prototype and to keep your constraints honest
• Understanding of how AI-assisted development changes the architect's role: what to specify, what to evaluate, and where to keep human judgment

Responsibilities

• Design end-to-end architectures for AI-native solutions: orchestration, retrieval, tool and system integration, agent autonomy and guardrails, identity and authorization, evaluation, observability, and cost model
• Fit each solution exactly to the business scope - no more, no less - and be able to explain what you deliberately left out and why
• Turn incoherent or contradictory requirements into explicit business decisions: surface them, reframe them in business terms, price the options, and get a named owner to decide
• Make and document architectural trade-offs (build vs buy, model selection, retrieval strategy, autonomy level, cost vs quality) in a form that stakeholders can challenge and future teams can trust
• Define the evaluation strategy for each system: how we will know that an assistant or agent fits the business scope, not just that it produces fluent output
• Author the constraints, guidelines, and architectural fitness functions that engineering teams and coding agents build within, and revise them as the organization learns what generation gets wrong
• Decide where humans must stay in the loop - regulated decisions, data of record, security boundaries, anything with legal or contractual consequence
• Work within EPAM delivery teams and in presales: shape proposals, present options and costs to client executives, and review designs across teams
• Build proofs of concept and reference implementations when, and only when, a decision needs evidence or a team needs an example of "good"
• Contribute to EPAM's AI architecture practice: reference architectures, reusable patterns, and mentoring architects who are transitioning into AI-native design

Skills

AI architecture

Distributed systems

Cloud architecture

Requirements trade-offs

Stakeholder management

Architecture documentation

Prototyping & coding

AI-assisted development

Tools

Agent frameworks

MCP

Orchestration patterns

LLM observability

OAuth 2.1

SPIFFE

AuthZEN

DPoP

Job description

EPAM Systems, Inc. is seeking an AI Architect to design the target architecture of AI-native applications for large enterprise clients, including RAG systems, assistants, and agentic workflows. You will define evaluations, guardrails, and constraints, framing problems and aligning ownership across teams.

The role emphasizes decision-making over code volume, with hands-on prototyping when evidence is needed and mentoring of other architects in EPAM's AI practice.